The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  Instead, approaching the bed, I observe, or rather my mouth insinuates without quite receiving clearance from my brain, that her anxiety must have got so much worse this past week.

  It’s become unbearable, she admits. I’ve been alternating between fits of weeping and catatonic numbness. Dr. Stein’s already increased my dosage. But the feeling just isn’t going away…

  In the fading echo of her words I think I hear a plea she cannot vocalise. I sit down next to her. Her eyes grow large. The question forming in her brain is pushing them out toward me. I reach for her arm, which yields to my grasp. Gently, I stroke the white lines, asking, with my thumb, whether I have understood her correctly. At the point of contact, our skin vibrates with an unspeakable, almost shameful desire.

  Vera, I venture with a whisper. Do you need me to—

  Yes. I need you to. There’s one in the drawer to the left of the sink.

  Without dressing, I walk slowly through the unlit living room into the kitchen and open the drawer to the left of the sink where she and Katie keep their cutlery.

  MIDWIFE OR ABORTIONIST?—When Socrates calls the philosopher the midwife of truth in the Theaetetus, he does not seem to be aware of the full implications of his metaphor. Precisely because truth requires a midwife to be brought into the world, it is never enough for a judgement to actually be true for it to be taken as such. Only at his trial would Socrates realise, too late, that the message is invariably compromised by the messenger.

  I was the first to arrive at the Queen’s Lane Coffee House for our study session. There were two empty tables in the back corner. I pulled them together and covered the surface of the second with my books and notes, so it would appear taken, its owner having just stepped out to use the toilet or the telephone. I sat facing the windows that looked out onto the High. Whilst I waited for the others, I looked over the menu, though I already knew what I would order, because I ordered the same thing every time we went there. It was pointless to begin revising, because waiting made it difficult to concentrate: lifting my head every few moments to see if they were the ones coming through the door would be too distracting. The menu was only to keep myself—and the table—looking occupied.

  I sensed a presence near the chair opposite mine and put the menu down, expecting to see a waitress. Instead it was Gregory Glass. He sat down, and before I could coldly inform him it was being saved for someone else, he said, “Don’t worry. I won’t be long.”

  The waitress, under the impression that this was the person I’d been waiting for, swooped down on us, pulled a pen from the tangled bun of her hair, flipped open a notepad with the brusqueness of a Fleet Street reporter, and said, “Something to drink then?” I ordered my tea and told her I’d be ordering food when the rest of my friends arrived. Much to my irritation, Gregory ordered a cup of coffee.

  He waffled on about his tutors that term and about some of the people at Pembroke he considered, wrongly, our mutual acquaintances. I wondered what he could possibly be driving at. We had barely spoken a hundred words to each other the whole year and the time for casually sharing my table to engage in friendly chitchat had long since passed. I wished he would say what he had come to say, or leave me alone. It was imperative that he not be there when the others arrived.

  “You and Zach Foedern are pretty tight, aren’t you?”

  Of course. He’d come to talk to me about Zach. Zach was the only thing Gregory and I had in common. He was the former friend and I the current one. What else could it have been? In answer to his question, I said nothing. I didn’t even nod my head. In fact, it wasn’t a proper question, since we both knew what the answer was. Rather it was one of those statements in an interrogative tone Gregory was so fond of making. It was a throat clearing, a way to announce the topic of conversation. I looked straight ahead, hoping to be as discouraging as possible. Whatever Gregory was so keen on telling me about Zach was certainly not something I was interested in hearing.

  “You know he and I know each other from Columbia.”

  How would Zach deal with such an imposition? Probably he’d say something elegant, cutting. His words ambiguous, his meaning unmistakable. The waitress arrived. She placed Gregory’s coffee in front of me and my cup of tea in front of him. Awkwardly, we swopped saucers. As he nattered on I looked out the window until something he said caught my attention.

  “What did you just say?”

  “About his sister? You know he has a twin sister, right?”

  “Of course,” I replied. I resented the implication that he knew something important about Zach that I didn’t. “Vera.”

  “Ever met her? Strange girl. Beautiful. But definitely strange. Maybe even a little unwell if you know what I’m saying.”

  I said nothing.

  “She lived in my suite freshman year. In a double. With another girl named—well, her name’s not important. Zach had a single in a dorm across campus, but he was always over. The TV in the common area was basically theirs. They were always watching movies on it, always these foreign arty movies. And if you wanted to use the TV to watch a baseball game or a Seinfeld rerun, or if you asked them to turn it down, because you couldn’t concentrate on your problem sets with all the shouting in Japanese or French or German or whatever, you’d get sneered at and ignored. Anyway. At some point during the middle of the first semester, Zach convinced Vera’s roommate to switch rooms with him, something that just isn’t done. In fact, I’m pretty sure coed dorms are against the rules, even if the people living in them are siblings. Rumor has it they bribed the RA and Vera’s old roommate not to report it. Point is they were inseparable. I never saw the two of them apart. Never. Not in the library. Not in the dining hall. Not at parties. Not in the bars. Not even when they were walking between classes.”

  “And?”

  “And I just thought it was kinda weird that Zach showed up by himself this year. I tried asking him about it, subtly of course, indirectly you know, but—”

  “Listen, Gregory.” My patience with this one-sided conversation had finally worn out. “What is it you’re trying to tell me?”

  “What I’m trying to tell you is: keep your eyes open.”

  My eyes were open, but they were not looking at him. Through the window, I could see Claire and Tori locking up their bicycles. Thankfully, Zach wasn’t with them. I raised my hand when they entered. Gregory looked over his shoulder to see whom I was signalling. He turned back and gave me the kind of pitying look priests give to those who are deaf to their warnings about the infinite torments of hell. For their benefit, he said, as he stood, “Nice talking to you, Owen.” Then he picked up his saucer and found himself a seat at an open table.

  “Who was that?” Claire asked. I moved my rucksack to the floor so she could have the seat it had been saving. It occurred to me that, save for Zach, Claire had never seen me interact with any other students from Pembroke.

  “Some bloke from college. We were in the same economics lecture Michaelmas Term.”

  Tori sat down. “Zach’s not here yet?”

  “I thought he’d be coming with you,” I said. “Not that he has much to study for, mind. Should I text him?”

  “Don’t bother.” She set up her study materials at the table. “You know he never responds to them.”

  An hour later, he made his entrance in his habitual manner, in a flurry of manic speech. “I’ve just had the most incredible experience!” he exclaimed. “I probably won’t be able to do it justice, because I’m almost certain it’s beyond the limits of language. In fact, as soon as I became aware that I was having an experience, it stopped.” The other customers looked up to see who was guilty of disrupting the volume level of the café. Disapproving glances were shot in our direction. At the periphery of my vision, I saw Gregory note Zach’s presence and adjust his chair, leaning imperceptibly toward us.

  “Well. What was it?” I asked.

  “On my way here I was walking across Pembroke Square and as I was walking I heard the h
eels of my shoes echo on the cobblestones.” We waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. That was the end of his story.

  “You’re stoned, aren’t you?” Tori said.

  “Not at all. Why would you say that?”

  “You heard the echo. Of your heels. On the cobblestones. That’s your incredible experience, love? That’s all?”

  “What do you mean, that’s all!” he shouted, to a chorus of hushes from the other customers. He continued in a vehement whisper. “It was incredible. The border that normally separates us from the external world disappeared and I felt no difference between me and the cobblestones and the walls of the college and the parked cars and the sky. I was perceiving, of that I’m certain. But without subjectivity, without self.”

  “As if you were ‘one with everything,’” said Tori, air quoting the phrase with her fingers.

  “I suppose so, my dear, though it sounds trivial when you put it that way. Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about the unio mystica. But since we know there is no God I think it would be more accurate to say that it was like I was nothing at all or that somehow I, Zachary, or my ego or personal identity or whatever you want to call it was suddenly subtracted from the world. Like ‘I’”—and here he responded with air quotes of his own—“was experiencing ‘my own’ death. All in all it lasted only a moment, but ‘to me’ that moment seemed to go on for a long time. A very long time.”

  “How did it feel?” Claire asked, with genuine curiosity. As she was the only one of us who had been raised in a religious household—her father was a Methodist minister—Claire was disposed to take seriously statements that bordered on expressions of faith and spirituality, even when they happened to come from the mouth of an avowed atheist like Zach.

  “Blissful. Truly blissful,” he told her. “A pleasure such as I’ve only ever felt once before in my entire life.”

  Tori looked at me, not knowing how to respond. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Had to be there, I guess.” Zach sounded disappointed. Whatever he had been expecting us to say, it was clear we weren’t saying it. Seeing that everyone was more interested in working, he rummaged around in his satchel and took out a pen, a notebook, and a German grammar. The state he described reminded me of how I felt walking back from Claire’s that first afternoon, and of how I felt when I’d swallowed the tablet at the Theory party. But between my distracting conversation with Gregory and my anxiety about having for too long postponed my revisions, it had been difficult to pay much attention to his story.

  I looked in Gregory’s direction. He was looking out the window at the passersby on Queen’s Lane. Conspicuously looking, it seemed to me, as I had been conspicuously looking at my book when Zach burst through the door after his row with Tori. I was certain he’d been listening in on every word Zach said. Wonder what he made of it.

  THE ORIGINS OF CLOTHING.—The origins of clothing should be sought in man’s desire to forget that his skin is already a kind of uniform. Masks, disguises, costumes—these are worn above all to conceal something from the wearer, who wishes to appear as someone or something else, in order to convince himself that his body is not what it really is: a mask, a disguise, a costume worn by Nature. Just so, we are never more deceived than when we speak of the nakedness of truth. Truth is something tailored, something we have sewn together, stitched up, embroidered, woven, hemmed, and cut. It is something that has to be put on—one leg at a time.

  No note this morning. I search under the pillow. Nothing. I throw off the sheets in case it had fallen. Check the surface of her desk. Of her chest of drawers. Nothing.

  Was hoping for a note. Had been counting on one, in fact. To give me some indication of how she was feeling. To explain what is happening to us. Between us. Or at least to tell me where I should meet her. Here? Her parents’ flat? Outside the opera house? I half suspect we’ll meet tonight and pretend that nothing happened. But something has happened.

  The only message for me this morning is from Claire. In my inbox. And it I’d rather not read. It’s not just that I worry about what I’ll discover there. What awful new news she’ll have of Tori. How can I write her back words of comfort now? After last night. Our relationship has managed to survive my silence about what happened with Nadya. But I don’t know how it can survive my silence about Zach. Or Vera.

  Though I have less than forty-eight hours left in New York, I’m not at all keen on leaving the flat. I try to think on all the things I might never see if I don’t summon up the will to put on clothes and walk out the door. The Empire State Building. Times Square. The Museum of Modern Art. Fifth Avenue. The Brooklyn Bridge. A slide show of a holiday that may never be. Tonight there will be the opera: maybe that’s enough sightseeing for one day. One can’t see everything anyway. Even if it would never be included in a travel guide, to me, Vera’s room is just as much of a sight as the view from atop the World Trade Center.

  If I board that aeroplane tomorrow night, I know I’ll regret it for as long as I live. Falling in love is like that, I’m coming to understand. Falling in love—with a place, with a person—is like being infected by an incurable disease. A virus of permanent longing, which cannot be treated, even by large doses of time. One must learn how to accept this, I reckon. Or learn how not to fall in love at all.

  In the kitchen, Katie is adding a banana to her bowl of yoghurt and granola. She is dressed for the gym. A sweatband separates her golden hair from her high forehead. The blade moves with professional swiftness and precision between her forefinger and her thumb. The fleshy yellow-white circles that fall into the bowl are perfectly thin and even. I can’t help wondering if she’s using the same knife Vera washed clean before we fell asleep last night. On the sleeve of my white t-shirt is a reddish-brown stain. I cover it with my palm. A private thought bends my lips with pride: I have a scar on my bicep, just like the Foedern twins.

  Good morning, Owen. I was just making myself breakfast. Can I interest you in something to eat?

  I’m not hungry, but I tell her I’ll have what she’s having. Just to watch her slice her way through another piece of fruit.

  Katie is a student of biology. This year she will be applying for Master’s programmes in Public Health. When she finishes, she hopes to go on to get her medical degree and pursue a career as an epidemiologist. For the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her research specialty: infectious diseases. Real diseases, not metaphorical ones. Of the sexually transmitted variety.

  What for? I ask.

  What do you mean, what for? She is sincerely perplexed; perhaps it has never occurred to her to wonder. To save lives, obviously. To make a difference. A real, tangible difference. People in the Third World lack access to adequate health clinics, affordable supplies of medicine, and up-to-date information that will help them take steps to improve their sexual health and prevent the spread of HIV.

  She hands me a bowl of yoghurt and a spoon. We haven’t found a cure, she acknowledges, but with antiretroviral drug cocktails we’ve at least found a way to make it easier for people to live with the disease. Every person who dies of AIDS in the Third World is dying a preventable death.

  I wonder what Zach would have made of his sister’s friend. Wouldn’t have approved, is my guess. He always treated do-gooders and optimists not as stupid, exactly, but as hopelessly naïve. Blissfully ignorant or unwilling to face up to the facts of life. Specially the fact that we’re all going to die.

  But they’re all going to die anyway, I tell her. On Katie’s face a frown begins to form. Slowly and with effort, as if her muscles were performing a strenuous stretch made particularly difficult by lack of practice.

  Have you ever seen someone die of AIDS? It isn’t a pretty picture.

  So that’s what life’s about? The absence of suffering?

  Fine. Why do you study philosophy? Or whatever it is.

  She’s right. It’s much easier to ask questions than to answer them. After a
long pause, I say: Who knows really? Maybe to find an answer to just that question: what’s life about, what is it for. Although it doesn’t seem likely, does it? We’ve been studying the problem for almost three thousand years and haven’t figured anything out. To pass the time, then? One has to do something whilst one waits to die.

  Katie takes her bowl to the sink. She pours some thick green washing-up liquid in the bowl and begins to scrub it clean. I join her there with mine.

  You know what I call that? she says, taking my bowl from me. I call that despair. And despair is a luxury. A First World problem. I spent last summer in a farming village in Botswana. The men would work from dawn till dusk in the mines and every morning they got up and did it again. There was no indoor plumbing, no running water, no electricity. Dire poverty. Illiteracy. People barely living past their fifties. Conditions you or I would call not worth living in. And yet no one there gives up or gets depressed or—

  Kills themselves? I interrupt. What a joke. Am I really going to be lectured to about luxury by a person whose father probably makes one hundred times as much money as mine does? You’re right, Katie. That’s what everyone says. Only the affluent have the resources and leisure time to worry whether life is worth living.

  She drops the bowl and the dishcloth into the sink and throws her arms around my neck. Into my ear she whispers, Listen to me, Owen. Life is worth living. It just is. There’s no reason why. You just have to believe me, okay?

  She lets her hands slide to my shoulders and looks deeply into my eyes. Her sincerity and compassion are moving. What if what she’s saying is true? What if the solution to the problem of life is the vanishing of the question? She seems to have understood this better than Zach and I had done. By never needing to consider it. The disease of doubt: some people just aren’t born with it. The rest of us may very well be incurable, no matter how many books we read. Throw away the ladder once you’ve climbed it? Easier said than done. Some people get to the top rung. Look out. Jump.